It seems fitting somehow that "Healing Machine," an explosion of sculpted metal wire by the outsider artist Emery Blagdon, now resides near Marcel Duchamp's "Big Glass" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Duchamp, who came from a family of sophisticated French artists, created one of the great, if most enigmatic, works of 20th-century modernist art. Scholarly tomes and countless dissertations have been written about "Big Glass," which is itself an explosion of sculpted metal and glass and paint. Duchamp may, in fact, have been the original outsider artist. Blagdon, on the other hand, hailing from a hardscrabble Nebraska farm family, never had an art lesson or hung out in museums. He created his bizarre mobiles perhaps because if you live in Nebraska you take your pleasure where you find it.

Why one work is considered fine art and a pioneer of modernism and the other is relegated to "outsider" status is left to the profs and curators of shows like "'Great and Mighty Things': Outsider Art from Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection," on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until June 9. Blagdon is just one of 27 outsider artists whose work is on spectacular view there. Each artist is given more space in the breathtaking catalog by the same title that accompanies the exhibition, published by Yale University Press. Each work of art can be equally enjoyed for the imagination and effort needed to create it, let alone explain it.

No matter how one approaches this show, however, you eventually bump up against that problematic term "outsider artist." That label could conceivably cover anyone. After all, most artists, however deluded, love to fancy themselves as being outside the box of trends or styles. At its most raw and vital, "outsider" status is extended to self-taught or "untrained" artists (basically, this means people who haven't had the privilege of being exploited by New York gallery owners). They use unconventional ingredients, often the only thing they have at hand (house paint, sand, glue, popsicle sticks, magic markers, beads, baubles, trash, and in Blagdon's case, discarded wire), and they work in media that "trained" artists would probably not consider (cardboard boxes, trash can lids, chunks of aluminum siding, etc.).

For a while there, in the 1980s and 1990s, outsider art had a raised profile, partly due to artists like Howard Finster, scholars like Howard Hemphill and collectors like the Bonovitz family. Finster, whose work was coveted by rock bands like R.E.M. and Talking Heads, is the star of the show in Philadelphia. His work is almost miraculously and consistently good and his productivity was superhuman (of course, after he became famous, his family helped with the assembly line process). A few other artists equaled Finster in vision and imagination, and some are on view in Philadelphia alongside him.

Often, though, when outsider art is viewed in a mass quantity, such as at the now-defunct annual Puck Building Fair in New York, it can seem as depressingly redundant as a museum filled with abstract art created from geometric shapes. Some of the art cuts to the quick and deflates any pretentious attempts to intellectualize it and, thus, elevate it to fine arts status. But, as an ongoing force to reckon with in the art world, outsider art seemed like a fad that would have run its course by now. Of course, people thought the same of rap music, but they are now inducting rap artists into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe, then, it's time that outsider artists were given their own wing in the gilded galleries of the fine art institutions, an idea this popular show in Philadelphia helps to promote.

Ah, but here's the rub: If you put most children's art that you find on nearly every refrigerator in America next to the work of, say, Eddie Arning, Herbert Singleton or Sister Gertrude Morgan (all given lavish layouts in this handsome volume and plenty of wall space in Philadelphia), you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart without some expert to explain it to you.

The curators are far too kind in this regard, in fact. They figuratively pat outsider artists on the head and offer the sort of softball platitudes that they'd never extend to so-called "fine artists." For example, they note that outsider art "occupies a position parallel to but not identical with mainstream modern and contemporary art." And, further along, they say, "good art is good art regardless of the maker's resume." Well, duh, you say, but some of this is NOT good art. It may be of heightened interest to people more as curiosity than art object because the makers often really are living on the edge or in the margins.

Take Bill Traylor, for example. He is practically a god to outsider art collectors, on the level with Picasso and Leonardo in their minds. Somewhere along the way, a rich and influential collector declared that Traylor's work possessed great and mighty value and everyone else raced to gobble up all the Traylor available. It's still crude art, any way you look at it, art that is blunt and frightening, the sort of art you'd think a person at a mental institution would make as part of their rehabilitative therapy. It reminds me of a guy I used to see in the snack bar at the Library of Congress who was always doodling in a spiral notebook, filling the pages with weird flowerings of shapes and odd drawings of men with penises coming out of the sides of their legs. Who am I to say he wasn't a great, but overlooked, outsider artist?

It's all here in this volume, the good (Finster, Joseph Yoakum, Ted Serl, Emery Blagdon), the bad (mentioned above) and the marginally good. Though this beautiful catalog was published for the museum exhibition that ends its run in June, the book holds its own as a great reference tool and resource on this always provocative and sometimes maddening genre.

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